New Mothers Do Not Glow
by angel-death-dealer
Summary: Felicity struggles most with the realities of having a baby, but luckily has the world's best confidence boost on hand. Oliver/Felicity


Felicity had always been comfortable in her own body. Despite grown up as the daughter of a Vegas mom who was determined to keep her body in perfect shape, she'd never obsessed about her weight. She ate healthily, exercised as much as she could stand to, and her indulgences never seemed to impact negatively upon her.

She hated her body now. She hated it with a burning passion.

Her body no longer felt like her own. She felt like every inch - every extra inch - was betraying her, taunting her, and slowly destroying every inch of what little self-confidence she had left.

She loved being a mother. She adored her. Her baby boy was the most precious thing in her world and she loved him with everything she had, but she just wished that her son hadn't decided to wreck her body when he came into this world.

There were things about pregnancy that none of the thirty-two books she'd read had prepared for her. The books hadn't prepared her for the idea that Oliver would thrive on fatherhood, that his need to protect what was his ended up with him lifting his crying son out of the crib while Felicity was still trying to untangle her legs from the blankets. There wasn't any doubt that Tommy Queen was the safety little boy in all of Starling City.

Pregnancy hadn't been easy. Once they had gotten over the fears of their child - unplanned, happy accident of a child - being a target, there had been problems with blood pressure, and water weight, and early labour, an eventual c-section that Felicity absolutely hadn't wanted, but it was essential to her and her baby surviving the labour. For weeks, she'd struggled to get up without flashes of pain, and she was lucky enough to have Oliver's constant support and his unwavering loyalty.

So loyal and supportive, in fact, that he hadn't even hinted at the idea of her body becoming the one-woman sideshow of a freak show.

It was hard to lose the baby weight while she was recovering from her c-section. She'd had an exercise plan, and it had failed at her first hurdle. Her body curved in ways it never had before, pockets of fat that had built up from water retention that had never gone away. She attributed each one to the mint-chip ice cream cravings her son gave her. She lived in sweat pants, or sundresses and leggings, no longer able to fit her fuller thighs into the tiny skirts and jeans she'd worn before her pregnancy. Sometimes her thighs wobbled when she walked down stairs or tried to run. She hated that. Her body was moving of its own accord and that didn't feel natural.

Stretchmarks were another curse of child-growing. Her stomach was covered in angry red marks because Tommy had not been a small baby, despite being born early, and her body was incredibly tiny before him. She also had marks across her thighs and hips where the skin had grown, but they had faded quickly into silvery lines. Her stomach was a battlefield site that itched and it wasn't until four months passed that they finally started to ease off. She used a cream on them to reduce the scarring, but even that didn't seem to help as much, even with her c-section scar.

Her periods had turned into hell she'd not been prepared for. She thought the grumble of cramping in her lower stomach had been painful before, but there was nothing compared to the six week onslaught of bleeding that she was convinced may actually leave her needing a transfusion. It was even hard to deal with under Oliver's care, and he never once complained about how many times he needed to help her get out of bed and into the bathroom, and she swore the man deserved a knighthood for not only getting up in the night to pass Tommy to her so she could feed him, but also to change bloodied sheets without a word of complaint.

Her shoe size had gone up while she was pregnant, due to the swelling. She'd hoped that would have been reversed - it hadn't. When Tommy was five months old and she really wanted to wear her pale blue heels to Sara's fifth birthday party, she'd broken down in tears next to the closet because none of her coveted shoe collection fit her. Oliver swore to buy her more pairs. It wasn't the same.

Oliver had loved the way her breasts had swollen during her pregnancy, and with her heightened hormones it had lead to an appreciation of body worship that even they had never reached before. Once Tommy was weaned onto soft foods and away from breastfeeding, part of her had foolishly hoped that one part of her body would go back to how it was. That was foolish indeed. Her breasts were larger still, but nowhere near as pert as they used to be, sensitive in annoying ways after the months of breastfeeding, and she looked at the delicate cups of her old bras with a distasteful longing for the maternity bras she now lived in.

Pregnancy will suit you, Lyla had told her. You'll glow, her mother had told her. Everything will fall into place when your baby gets here, Laurel had told her.

Liars, all of them.

So she tried to regain her former confidence. She tried desperately. She worked out when she could, and eventually her stomach had shrunk enough for her to no longer wonder if there was another baby trying to hide away in there. She jogged with the stroller when she walked to the park with Tommy. She used Tommy as a weight when she lay on her back and raised the squealing boy above her head (even after the time he threw up directly onto her face). She got her hair cut for the first time in eight months and got new clothes to flatter her new body shape. She even joined a weight-loss group for new mothers - it shocked her even more that she made friends there, and that there wasn't a single thing she was feeling and experiencing that wasn't normal.

She still refused to make love to Oliver unless they were underneath the blanket with all the lights off. He didn't complain, but she knew it was bothering him that a man so visually stimulated hadn't actually seen her naked in close to seven months.

She'd been enjoying a rare hour of peace on the bed, finally reading the first few chapters of the book she'd actually planned on reading before Tommy arrived, when Oliver slipped into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. He'd been out on what Diggle had insisted was a regular father's trip to the park, which usually consisted of the two of them sat next to Tommy's stroller while Sara ran frantically around the playground. He had a look of mischief on his face, biting his lip as he took in the convenience of seeing her already laid out on the bed.

"Tommy's asleep, I just put him down," he told her.

"Great, because I'm really enjoying this chapter," Felicity mumbled, distracted by the book in her hands.

"He'll probably sleep for another hour, at least," Oliver continued approaching the side of the bed and stretching out on his side next to her.

"That gives me time to get some bottles ready for him before he wakes up, and...oh," she broke off when she felt his hand sneaking up her hip. A soft touch, but highly suggestive. "Oliver, it's the middle of the day…" she hesitated.

"So?" he asked her, that all-too-familiar grin on his face. "We used to have sex in the middle of the day all the time," he reminded her, as he ducked his lips against her neck and tossed her book across the room. "And in the morning, and in the shower, and in the kitchen, and in the foundry, and that one time in the airplane restroom…"

"But-" the argument died on her lips, but the protest was there all the same. Those were all wonderfully stimulating memories but they were also times when Felicity wasn't ashamed of her own appearance.

He picked up on her hesitation though, and drew his lips back, propping his head up on his arm as he watched her. She remained sprawled out on her back, her head turned towards him. He could see it all in her eyes, everything he'd noticed and suspected for months. "Why do you worry that I'm not attracted to you any more?" he asked her quietly, his hand dropping to her hip.

She looked down at his hand placement, avoiding his eyes. "Everyone says that becoming a mother is this beautiful life-changing event and that your life is never the same again," she told him. "They're right about that, but it's definitely not beautiful."

Oliver's lips parted as if he was going to respond, but she cut him off.

"I don't feel like me any more," she whispered. "I don't recognise myself in the mirror anymore. I'm covered in all these stretch marks and there's all this extra weight that never used to exist that just won't shift, and my hips are huge now. Not to mention the dark circles under my eyes, like, constantly, and my boobs are sagging which is really depressing because I'm not even thirty until next month and my boobs are already failing me, and they were really good boobs, Oliver," she babbled on, her hands coming up to cover her eyes because dear god, "Even my emotional state is ruined."

"They were good boobs," Oliver agreed and dammit she could hear the smile in his voice. "But I don't think you understand how much more beautiful this makes you," he told her, his thumb circling her hip bone.

"I feel like a bad mother," she confessed. "I mean...I love Tommy. I really love him so much, he's the best guy in the world - no offence to you - but...I feel like he ruined me at the same time."

"Felicity," he whispered, his hand rising to cup her cheek and press a kiss to her forehead before he was up on his feet, tugging her hand.

"What are you doing?" she asked, her voice dangerously thick with emotion.

"Come here," he said simply, pulling her to stand in front of her least favourite place in the entire house - the full length mirror on the far side of the room. It taunted her daily, the glass image of her changing body, and she really, really didn't want to be here. Except Oliver's arms were sneaking around her waist. "Do you know what this is?" he asked, peppering kisses across her shoulder.

"The start of a really horrible episode of Embarrassing Bodies?" she said with a small sniff in her words.

"No," he said, not hiding the hint of laughter in his tone. He raised his eyes to hers in the mirror, and she was ashamed to see him still look at her with this unfaltering love she didn't feel she deserved. Oliver had been so good to her at every hurdle, and what had she given him in return?

"This is the body of the woman who carried my son," he told her, his hands slipping from her waist to her stomach. "This is where he grew...my little boy lived here for eight months and I can't figure out why he was so determined to arrive early and leave this. This is where he was safest, right inside his mother." She drew in a breath, her head resting back against his shoulder. "This is where I placed my hands when I found out you were pregnant, and then that we were having a boy, or whenever I needed to feel close to my family. His hand slid to the side slightly. "This is exactly where my hand was the first time I felt him kick," he recalled.

Then his hand was slipping the waistband of her sweatpants down just enough that the stretch marks on her stomach were visible. He traced his thumbs over them in a way that made Felicity bite her lip at this intimacy. "This is the mark he left on you for carrying him. One tiny scar for each time he kicked you, each time he let you know he was in there waiting to meet us." Probably not true. Scientifically, that couldn't be true, but why, oh why, did this man have to be so perfect?

His hand slid lower, each of his large hands closing around the top of her thighs. "These are the thighs I helped hold in place when you tried to push him into the world," he smiled. "Pure strength, because I've never seen you as strong as when you tried to refuse that c-section," he laughed slightly in recollection.

Oliver's hand came up to trace the scar on her stomach from the surgery. "This is where my son came into the world from," he explained. "This scar is better than any of mine. There is no pain in this scar, no guilt, no suffering. This is a scar that said we bettered our existence by bringing him into our lives. This scar says that we made something so beautiful and perfect and precious that it was wrong to keep him inside because we needed to show him the world."

By the time his hands trailed up her sides, he was taking her t-shirt - well, his t-shirt - with them, and he whipped it over her head and across the room without listening to her protest, she had tears on her cheeks. She hadn't been this bare in front of him in months, and feeling his thumbs stroking the underside of her breasts was a comfort she'd missed.. "This is where my son would feed from, and that made him strong, made him grow, and to be honest, these maternity bras are genius with their easy access," he teased, his fingers only brushing against the extra openings on the front.

"You need to stop being so perfect," she choked out, turning her face into the side of his neck as his arms came around her fully. "I can't keep up."

"Felicity, I love you," his voice was firm, and she could feel him looking down at her as he spoke even as his arm traced up her back. "Don't ever be ashamed of what you look like or especially what you feel like when you're with me. You're my wife. Mother of my child. You're ashamed of this body? I'm in love with it. It bought my son life, it gave me my family, my home…" He lifted her chin so she could see him properly when he spoke, and she saw just as much emotion in his eyes as there was spilling from her own. "You might be carrying a little extra since Tommy was born, but that's okay. I think the world could do with a little more of you in it."

"Oliver Queen, you're such a sap," she said quietly, but she was feeling better about herself for the first time in months. She stood on raised toes to press her lips to his, her arms crushing around his neck as she tried to drown in him. "Never stop being perfect."

"I'll try," he smirked back. "So, let's forget about this longing for your old body, and start working out how your new one works."


End file.
